P told me a story about teaching, he teaches fourteen and fifteen year-olds art in London. We joke about pedagogy with L.
It seems to me that to hold possession of a room full of British teenagers the best approach would be to issue each of the little fuckers a Stanley Knife (Monkey knife fight!) – that the Lord of the Flies is immanent in this anarcho-Darwinist scenario.
P is from Finland. Sometimes in the night his eyes gleam. He plays an amplified acoustic guitar with a complex delay pedal. A year or so ago I gave P a rubber mask. He strolled around a Helsinki museum in it serenading the guests with harsh blows to the soundboard processed into echoes and loops.
It seems to me that to hold possession of a room full of British teenagers requires a sense of security, of total self-possession that I am seeing for the first time in P, he is happier here to. More relaxed.
Though it always takes a while to get the audiences attention his sets build and build in volume and drama until they explode in to the slow cursive of feedback.
This other P, or perhaps the same only somehow more positive, more purposeful P, explained to me over one too many at the Teufel that two days supply work in an altogether rougher school had put him straight.
He tells me how, called to the headmaster he had to report any insults the kids had thrown at him – the worst they could manage was, “one-legged Git.”
4/4/07
